(Edit: actually, I think it may be do BOTH of those things now that I read my conversation with the dev again)

yeah, the thread was hard to follow due to people talking about different concepts without realising. i feel like that would need to be clarified before implementing one (or both[^hopefully not])

Stage 1: Tagging and Presets (Community and Instance, no User defined Tags allowed)

Stage 2 (not sure if I’ll do that): Filtering, Cosmetics? (Border, Text Color)

yeah this seems fine (although cosmetics seems like a late stage issue to me, but meh)

I think backend wise not worrying about that is fine for now, the separation of tags per community can be achieved by filtering tag AND community ID in the filter, which could just be hidden from the user or displayed, there’s a separate discussion to be had about the filter features. Point is not separating these tags per community shouldn’t limit their filterability because community id’s already exist. Plus by not splitting them up in the backend general tags can be used across instances a lot more easily.

Subscribing to tags in a community could then work similar to that filter, again the issue would be how to make the UI bearable but backend wise should be no problem to implement.

i'm not surprised, that makes sense. as an aside: there are community id's? like, uuid's? or does he mean just [email protected] which is, i guess, an id?

For the stage 3 to be implemented (if anyone decides to implement this AT ALL) we will need to wait for weeks at best and months at worst. Now this makes it hard for me to decide how to proceed with my communities because the path of the tag system is not yet clear and I need to decide NOW which communities should be separate and which should become more general.

in my (irrelevant) opinion, separate communities are better. it's a paradigm that everyone knows, rather than some nebulous proposal that 1) may not be implemented 2) may be lacking features (rss etc.) 3) will almost certainly be more complex to use. also you could merge them at a later date and add links to the archived versions in the sidebar. not really optimal, but it is a solution

adding them all together won't prevent spam (although i guess it would make it easier for people to block..). there will be the same volume of posts, just all in one place. i have been trying to avoid flooding local though. i have a whole folder of art to add to these subs. although to be honest, i've no sympathy with the op. browse subscribed if you don't want to see irrelevant posts. if you browse all, be prepared to see posts you have no interest in

Edit: I talked with the dev, it will take months to reach stage 3. And I realised just now that not all content on c/imaginaryaviation will be vehicles which means that I will need to a create a new sub called c/imaginarylocomotion to be able to fully capture both of the subs.

ah yes, convoluted and intermingled subs. fun